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“This is not good.”
It’s a bit of an understatement. Time slows down enough for him to see it’s two giant balls of fire and not three, which is strangely comforting. But they have to jump out of the hot air balloon either way, so really it doesn’t matter much. Michael grabs him by the back of his shirt and hauls him up over the basket and the earth below looks smaller than it should, the ground looks much further away than Daniel knows it is.
Michael says, “Okay, here we go,” just as everything goes to shit around them, and let’s Dan drop. It’s not so bad besides the sheer, heart-stopping terror of free falling. It would almost be nice if Dan wasn’t about to die. He turns in the air in time to see the fire burn up the balloon and Michael jumping from the almost-gone basket, shaking himself out of his jacket. His on-fire jacket.
“You okay, Dan?” he yells. Or at least Daniel imagines he does over the rush of wind in his ears. And his screaming.
He imagines Michael’s saying, “This would be a good time for me to discover some powers, huh, Dan?”
And Daniel agrees. The ground is getting awfully close.
It’s really close. Uncomfortably close. But Daniel can’t help but think, hey, he should have most definitely hit the ground already. They weren’t that far up. He probably shouldn’t have so much time to think while falling to his death.
“Michael?” he says, instead of screaming. Says it like he’s calling him from behind a cubicle wall.
“Yeah, I know, right?” he hears, despite the fact none of this should be happening. “I was just about to get to third base. Timing.”
And then Michael is there, next to him, both of them falling together. Which also shouldn’t be happening, because of physics. He says, “I think I’m doing something.”
And Daniel says, “Well, that’s good. That’s good. Keep doing it then.” Because living is better than dying, in almost every circumstance.
“Some kind of magic!” Michael exclaims. Rolls over Dan and grabs him around his torso, holds on tight and sends them into a spin. “Hey Dan? Brace for impact.”
Daniel’s about to start screaming again, but everything goes black, and he’s probably definitely dead.
-
Heaven is sticky and smells like piss. Daniel licks his lips and groans, can feel cold tiles beneath his cheek and hear the dull roar of a hand drying machine. “This isn’t the afterlife,” Michael says, “it’s the restroom of a Carl’s Jr.”
“I wish I were dead,” Dan says, and nearly means it. “Why am I not dead?”
“Because things just always work out for me,” Michael says, like it’s obvious. And it should be by now. He can’t open his eyes, but Daniel can feel Michael kneel by him on the floor, and the excruciating pain of his hand resting lightly between his shoulder blades. “Man, I know it hurts but there is a situation -.”
He’s interrupted by a man on a bullhorn, muffled through a few doors and walls. The voice says, “Come out with your hands above your head.”
“Brewing,” Michael finishes. “And we are just soaked in blood. It couldn’t be helped.” Daniel can hear the squeak of Michael's sneakers on the floor and the sound of the door opening, just a little. Michael yells, “I’d like to see you try to put a body back together without causing a scene!”
Not one part of that sentence is anything Dan wants to think about too hard, so instead he opens his mouth and groans. Tries to convince his eyes to open. “You’ll feel better soon. I think. Honestly, Daniel, who knows? I’m kind of winging it here.”
“You don’t say,” Daniel says.
“I know it hurts,” Michael says again, and twists both his hands in the wet material of Daniel’s undershirt. “And this isn’t going to make it feel any better.” Without warning, Michael jerks him off the restroom floor of Carl’s Jr, and truthfully, Daniel didn’t know he was capable of making such terrible noise. “Screaming is okay,” Michael says, his voice distant even though Daniel can feel them pressed together. “Just don’t die again. We gotta get out of here.”
Daniel thinks, yeah, that’s a good idea. And dies again.
-
“-so that would be, okay. If you wanted to. I’m just saying that it wouldn’t be a -.”
“He can’t hear you,” a voice says, cutting Michael off.
“Yes he can,” Michael snaps, the ground rumbling under Dan’s back. And when his fingers brush against the inside of Dan’s right elbow it doesn’t hurt. “You don’t know shit about my best friend.”
“Right,” the voice, a woman’s voice, answers carefully. “Let’s move him.” She must have felt the rumbling too, Daniel thinks, and drifts away again.
-
“If you want to survive this, Dan, you’re going to have to stop dying. I’m getting tired.”
-
“I’m trying not to,” Daniel croaks, rubs his sandpaper tongue against the roof of his mouth. “It’s just as no fun as I imagined.”
He wiggles his toes, flexes his thighs, and feels alive, so he must be. It takes three attempts to open his eyes and the sun is so bright, so right there in his face and burning, that Daniel yelps and closes them again. Shifting around, Daniel can tell he’s on a bed, a very, very comfortable bed, actually, so that rules out shitty motels. Everything smells clean, like spring and laundry detergent, and there’s a weight pressed across the right side of his body that he knows, for no reason he can understand, is Michael.
But Michael was just sitting beside him, and Daniel can remember feeling the earth underneath him, grass and dirt, the way it had shook when Mike was angry.
“What?” Michael murmurs, his voice hoarse with sleep. “It’s not fun for me either. What are we talking about?”
“Dying,” Daniel says.
“Stop doing that.”
“I was trying to,” Daniel says, and coughs. A pain shoots from the center of his chest to the back of his mouth, and he's pretty sure he might die again.
There’s a sudden movement, the bed bouncing and dipping, and Michael is up on his knees somewhere around Dan’s hip. He puts his hands on Dan’s shoulders, the tip of his thumb brushing against the side of Daniel’s neck, cold as an ice cube. “You’re awake!” Michael says, the smile on his face shaping the sound of the words. “I thought - it’s been - Dan, you were a paperweight.”
Michael brushes his knuckles against the side of Dan’s face, and they’re freezing too. “Why are you so cold, Mike?”
“Can you open your eyes?” Michael says, ignoring him. “Did you try?” The bed bounces again as Michael jumps off, “Hold on, hold on. It’s too bright.”
“No shit,” Daniel says, his eyes still tearing from his first attempt.
“Go on. Try now.”
Daniel squints, opens one eye and then the other, and Michael is right there in front of him, kneeling around Dan’s knees.
“Oh, fuck me,” he groans, his stomach turning as soon as he sees Michael’s face. “What did you do?”
“You kept dying,” Michael raises his chin, but sounds small. His eyes are big and wild looking, and he scratches three fingers into his beard, the beard he definitely didn’t have the last time Dan saw him, one that would take weeks to grow. Defiantly, he says, “So, you know, I did what I had to.”
“What's going on? Why’re you so cold?"
“Because he’s a fucking idiot,” a voice says from the doorway, all gravel and battle hoarse.
“Hi, Sarge,” Daniel says, but keeps his eyes on Michael.
-
For the next hour Daniel listens silently as Sarge unloads all the exposition he needs. He drinks water and eats a quarter of a peanut butter sandwich, all of which almost immediately comes back up. Michael disappears and brings back ice chips, and the Sarge keeps talking, intermingled with an occasional flashback, drifting in and out. If Daniel wasn’t so sure he was alive, so familiar with what not being alive feels like, he’d assume the cold, emotionless feeling in the pit of his stomach was death.
How Michael got them out of the Carl’s Jr without being arrested doesn’t really matter when Sarge explains that, well, Daniel had been a mess of flesh and broken bones when he was dragged in there. Unsurprisingly, Michael has been less than cooperative when asked to explain what, exactly, went on in that restroom. But when he’d dragged Daniel out again he was a whole person, both of them covered in blood, bits of muscle, and shards of bone. Although Dan was, at that point, dead once again.
By the time Mandy found them outside of Wrightwood, he’d died three more times. And two times after that once they got him to the Chief’s place.
“So that’s… eight? Eight times?”
“Oookay,” Michael says, “it’s seven. And also, I was keeping you alive, not murdering you. Technically. It doesn’t count. It’s the opposite of a crime, in every county. I think.”
“I’m not mad at you,” Daniel sighs. “Well, no, I’m furious with you. I actually can’t remember the last time I was this angry at you and you’ve done, uh, yeah, a lot of things for me to be angry about.”
“Daniel -.”
“I don’t understand,” Dan says, talking over him, turning back to the Sarge. “I wouldn’t call myself a magic expert by any stretch of the word, but all of this seems a little beyond his ability? How did he -?”
The Sarge gives Daniel a long, unimpressed look, tinged with a little disgust. “You think someone taps into the secrets of the universe and just, what? Can grow a few goddamn heads? Damn it, O’Brien, how much shit have you seen him do.”
“Selective amnesia,” Michael says, crawling back onto the bed and resting his head on Dan’s leg. “But I have nothing to do with it. He’s blinded by love, not science. Or magic.”
Sarge stares at Michael for a minute then rolls his one good eye and huffs. “Anyway, as far as we can guess we have no fucking idea how he’s doing it, actually. And he refuses to say anything. Just sits in here all day and -.”
“Okay!” Michael sits up abruptly, jostling the bed into the nightstand and knocking over the cup of ice chips. “Now that we got this all sorted out, we’re done? Dan’s fine. Everything’s great. It doesn’t matter.”
With another sound caught somewhere between exhaustion and aggravation, Sarge stands, stretches and leaves without a word. He’s done, Daniel thinks. He’s been here for weeks babysitting Michael and his sometimes-dead body. They might never see him again.
“How did you do it, Mike?” Dan asks, leaning back into the pillows. Pressing the tips of his fingers, warmer now, to the palm of Daniel’s hand, Michael shrugs. “I got to know,” he says. “I feel - it’s different in here. I can feel it.”
Pulling away from him, Michael sits up and scoots to put some distance between them. He doesn’t look at Daniel when he says, “When you were falling I could feel something - and every time you died I got stronger.” He turns back to him, and presses his face to Daniel’s, scratching his cheek with his beard. “I had to keep bringing you back. I had to give you some of it.”
“Yeah,” Dan breathes, wrapping his arms around Michael the best he can. “I thought so.”
“Dan?” he says, pulling away just enough to meet his eyes. “The inside of your body is weird. I think I forgot to put a kidney back. You don't really need it.”
-
Four days later, standing in the Chief’s kitchen, he moves his finger around the rim of a glass of water, watching frost spread and freeze the liquid solid. It’s a power Dan’s seen before, and it sure as hell wasn’t from Michael.
“What did he really do?” Daniel asks, not bothering to turn around. He can feel the Chief in the shadows. Knows he’s there, without really knowing at all. It’s fucking creepy and Dan isn’t sure he’ll ever get used to it, or if he even wants to.
“It wasn’t on purpose,” he says, his voice less rough and artificial than the last time they spoke. It’s a change in him, Dan knows, not the Chief. “He killed them. First whoever attacked your balloon and then the rest of them. He needed their power and he took it. He doesn’t know.”
“Shit,” Dan says, and tightens his hand around the lip of the sink.
“Don’t tell him,” the Chief says. “The bright side is you’re both safe now. There’s no one left who wants him dead. Besides the regular people who usually want him dead.”
“Right.”
“Cheer up, Chew Toy. Welcome to the club. It’s just the three of us now.”
-
“What were you saying?” Dan asks, sliding back into bed. He pulls the blankets up around his shoulders, and presses his cold toes to Michael’s warm shins.
“Hmm?”
“You were talking to me in the woods? I think? You were saying something.”
Michael rolls over, wraps himself in his own blanket like a burrito, away from Dan’s toes, and puffs out a breath against his pillow. “Oh, right,” he says, half asleep. “Do you wanna date me?”
“Eh,” Daniel yawns. “I’ll think about it.”